Hang with Joyent and drink free beer!
I'm at the MySQL Users Conference today. Hangin' out with the likes of Mikael Ronstrom and Monty. I'm in the Sun booth representing OpenSolaris and talking with all types of developers, CTO's, and users many of which are still unaware that Solaris is open! In the booth we're showing off DTrace probes in MySQL, which is awesome except for the fact that Sun legal won't give the DTrace patch to MySQL! Monty said with absolute sincerity and ...
Ian Murdock as Sun Chief OS Platform Strategist : The Cuddletech Verdict
On March 19th, Ian Murdock, father of Debian Linux, joined Sun as "Chief OS Platform Strategist". He debuted in style, announcing himself in true community fashion on the OS-Discuss list and blogging about it. I'll be honest... I was upset and confused. Why of all people, Ian Murdock? Sun tried the Linux strategy thing and it was a failure, unless you count the renewed commitment to Solaris following the flop. Sun has since toned down its ...
Joyent Welcomes Derek Crudgington
Joyent's system team continues to grow as we continue our quest to provide our customers with the best solutions using the best technology available. In January Mark Mayo, of both Solaris and NetApp fame, came on board, and now we're pleased to welcome Derek Crudgington, of Solaris fame, to the family. Anyone working with Solaris will have stumbled across Derek's blog more than once.. at Joyent we ran across it so often we knew that he was ...
X4200 M2, Sun, and a Sprinkling of Revolution
This is a followup to my previous post: Getting Fed Up With Sun: Can't Get Systems, Breaking Existing Ones. I'm going to break things down area by area, given that I hit a lot in that one post. Sun Fire X4200 M2: Changes And What You Should Know. At Joyent we build out entirely on Sun X4100 Dual Proc, Dual Core, 2.4Ghz systems with 16GB of RAM for almost all of our products and solutions. Its a server that we know well and really love. ...
Getting Fed Up With Sun: Can’t Get Systems, Breaking Existing Ones
I'm sooooooooooo tired of making excuses for Sun. I just got two X4200 M2's, not because I want them but because Sun can't get Joyent X4100's. Why Sun can't produce systems to meet customer demand constantly amazes me! There aren't many people inside or outside of Sun who evangelize the company as much as I do, but I'm tired of getting people fired up about systems and then hearing they can't get systems! Not only can't Sun produce ...
James Burke’s “Connections”
I came across a great find today on iTunes. I've recently finished re-reading Plato's Republic and was thinking of moving next to rediscover Descartes, when I got one my favorite quotes of all time stuck in my head, James Burke's infamous line "...and that brings us to a guy named Descartes, on whom I blame everything." The point he makes is with regards to reductionism and James goes on to note a friend of his who has a degree in Milton's ...
Web 2.0 Mashup: Define it and win a prize
Last week I attended the Sun Mashup Event, a "Web 2.0" event put on by Sun's Startup Essentials program. This event used the old "entertaining romp" formula based on the line "those who can do, those who can't talk about it". In this case the one that can is Tim Bray, and the one who can't is Michael Arrington. These two personalities are, more than you can imagine, contrasting and unique. Michael referred to himself as "leading the ...
Conference Season is Upon Us
Its that time of year, conference season is open. As usual I'll do my best to be at any major Bay Area tech expo's where OpenSolaris can peek in its head. So far on the lineup is JavaOne running May 8-11 at Moscone, the MySQL Conference & Expo running April 23-26 in Santa Clara, and likely but as of yet unconfirmed LinuxWorld SF running Aug 6-9 at Moscone. I encourage everyone to come out for JavaOne. Last year I had a real blast at ...
Using Java to Whip Kstats into Shape
Peter Tribble is one of the most legendary of Solaris administrators, if you're a Solaris SA and you don't know Peter's name your just not paying attention. One of the reasons that Peter is such an amazing guy, besides his british wit, is how he uses Java like a chissle to naturally get things done. He's written a wide variety of excellent tools and he's just updated one of my favorite: jKstat. Digging through Solaris kstats can be ...
Zones start looking like Containers: CPU and Memory Caps
When Solaris Containers debuted with Solaris 10 many of us were blown away. At the time Zones became my primary passion because I was suffering from a massive shortage of test systems for everything from deployment testing to Enlightenment build and test install systems. I needed lots and lots of systems but they didn't need lots of CPU or memory, they just needed isolated Solaris installations and Zones filled that hole perfectly. But ...